Beyond the Adversarial Rivalry: A Developmental Rights-Based Model for Minor-on-Minor Crime, Part 1

When children harm children, the conventional victim–perpetrator framework is ill-equipped to address the developmental, relational, and institutional complexities involved. While juvenile justice scholarship increasingly emphasizes rehabilitation, and victims' rights literature has advanced child-sensitive protection, minor-on-minor offending remains underexplored across legal and social science disciplines. This Review Article draws on legal and criminological literature in juvenile justice, child development, and therapeutic jurisprudence, to examine tensions between the rights and interests of minor defendants and victims, and to identify the absence of an integrated framework within the juvenile justice system. To address this gap, we outline a four-pillar model integrating therapeutic justice, developmental principles, relational procedural justice, and children's rights norms. In this first of a two-parts project, we develop the theoretical framework for such cases and consider its novelty. Part II applies it to two case studies and offers practical implications.